History
How can history research help to solve the world’s most pressing problems?
How can history research help to solve the world’s most pressing problems?
What factors might contribute to global catastrophes and how can they be mitigated? How can we regulate transformative technologies so they have a positive impact? Are there choices we can make now to reliably improve the wellbeing of those who will live many decades later?
There are many questions like these which historians could help answer. The study of history can illuminate broad trends which could help us anticipate, prevent and prepare for major global challenges like great power war or societal instability. It can inform attempts to improve the future by offering insight into why past attempts were more or less successful and by identifying partial analogies for technologies like AI and bioengineering. It could inform our degree of confidence in our present day beliefs by revealing how these have changed over time.
Many topics studied by historians have clear relevance for decision-makers today; for example, advocates trying to improve the welfare of humans or animals could be more effective at achieving their goals if they have an accurate understanding of what tactics have been most effective for previous social movements. For policy-makers trying to reduce the risk of nuclear war, an understanding of how different events increased or decreased risk in the past could reveal helpful lessons.
As research in history that aims to be as useful as possible to decision-makers today seems fairly neglected. As a result, you could do valuable work by synthesising and analysing pre-existing research about an event and presenting your findings in a form that others can quickly understand the implications of.
To learn the right lessons from history, we need to understand what causative factors were the most important in a given event. The Sentience Institute, a think tank focused on the question of how to increase humanity’s moral circle, writes ‘the majority of historians consider causation to some extent. Historians do not, however, always provide thorough evaluations of the evidence supporting their claims, often privileging narrative and intuitions over explicit weighing of hard evidence or aggregation of those intuitions.’
If you’re attempting to distill useful lessons from history, we think your research should attempt to assess causation as rigorously as possible. While there’s significant debate about the appropriateness of using counterfactual analysis to better understand what the important factors were in an event, using quantitative methods from the social sciences could be useful for comparing factual and counterfactual conditions. Research on how to make counterfactual analysis rigorous includes Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics edited by Tetlock and Belkin.
It’s also important to consider whether the learnings that one historical event seems to imply actually replicate across multiple events. Consequently, some of the most useful research in these directions will likely involve looking for correlations in long-term trends or across multiple events, to see which insights reliably replicate, and then considering how these insights might inform our responses to current events.
However, for a thesis or dissertation you will likely need to focus on a more narrow question, such as a case study of a particular event or time period. One way you could have an impact with your research is therefore by working on a topic that would be informative to other researchers who are trying to build this big picture understanding, and presenting your findings in a rigorous and accessible way. Our coaches can connect you with researchers who can offer you guidance on choosing a topic, and organisations who could benefit from your research.
The profiles below are on some of the research directions we think could be particularly valuable to explore through a historical lens.
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This talk ‘From the Neolithic Revolution to the far future’ explores the potential for history research to inform our understanding of how to improve the world.
You could also look at this post on becoming a historian of large social trends for considerations to take into account if you are interested in pursuing this path.
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Here are sources from the Effective Altruism community and related organisations that feature questions a history student could take inspiration from:
